A City Reimagined: The Metamorphosis of Kafka and His Context

By MICHAEL FRANK

Published: August 16, 2002

''Prague doesn't let go. Of either of us. This old crone has claws. One has to yield, or else.''

This is Franz Kafka writing to Oskar Pollak, a friend of his youth. To Gustav Janouch, a young man he befriended later in life, he said of the place where he was born and lived most of his 41 years: ''This is not a city. It is a fissure in the ocean bed of time, covered with the stony rubble of burned-out dreams and passions, through which we -- as if in a diving bell -- take a walk. It's interesting, but after a time one loses one's breath.''

Friedrich Thieberger, Kafka's Hebrew teacher, one day stood with him at a window through which they could see Old Town Square. He watched the writer trace a few small circles with his finger as he said, ''This was my high school, the university was over there, in the building facing us, my office a bit further to the left. This narrow circle encompasses my entire life.''

And in his diary Kafka recorded a dream he had in 1911. He saw the center of Prague as ''the most beautiful set in the world and of all time.''

Prague the old crone, Prague the container of burned-out dreams and passions, Prague the circle that confines, Prague the most beautiful set; Prague, in the phrase of Ernst Pawel, one of Kafka's best biographers, ''his life's stage.'' The intricate relationship between the real and the imagined city, the city that formed Kafka and the city that everywhere informed his fictions (even if it was seldom specifically named in them): this is a rich subject for an exploration of almost any conceivable genre, be it written, filmed, staged or exhibited.

Exhibited it is. Yet ''The City of K.: Franz Kafka and Prague,'' at the Jewish Museum, is no ordinary show of a writer's memorabilia. While the usual materials are all in evidence -- manuscripts and ephemera (here, however, mostly all facsimile), photographs and early editions -- they have been arranged into what Juan Insua, its curator, calls ''12 Kafkaesque environments.''

Mr. Insua, who first mounted the show at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona and is the author of the turgid lead essay in the accompanying catalog, has shunned the more predictable biographical or chronological approach in favor of condensing, as he puts it, the ''principal conflicts of Kafka's life in Prague by letting ourselves be guided by the author's own gaze.''

''This means accompanying Kafka in his descent into the depths of his city,'' he continues, ''adapting ourselves to his sensory range and cognitive register, becoming engaged in a progressive distortion of space and time, and, above all, taking on an experience (not necessarily a pleasant one) that excludes only indifference.''

Maybe something is lost in translation, but it seems to me that Mr. Insua has been seduced by a perfectly understandable kind of curiosity that is particular to close readers of certain writers: he seeks to dissect, or perhaps just evoke, the mysterious, transformative alchemy that talent and imagination work on the actual. In other words, he wants to find the Prague in Kafka and the Kafka in Prague.

This is a special temptation in the case of Kafka, who speaks in two voices, each independently tantalizing: there are the foreboding stories and novels, which are persistently (if sometimes lazily) seen as having anticipated some of the worst, most totalitarian behavior and horrors of the 20th century, and there are the letters, diaries and reminiscences of Kafka by his friends, which lay out so many aspects of Kafka the man.

Through the latter we come to know Kafka the sufferer who was downright scientific in his attempts to describe and record his psychic and physical distress. We come to know the son who sought to free himself from his overbearing father, the lover who anguished over marriage, the bureaucrat who struggled in what we might now call his day job at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute and the man who was ambivalent about his Judaism and profoundly committed to his art. (''I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else.'')

Confounding, or nuancing, matters, though, there is also Kafka the devoted friend, Kafka the vegetarian, Kafka who searched for light and air cures (he made a trip to a nudist colony but was the only one there who wouldn't shed his trunks), Kafka who rowed, hiked and played tennis, Kafka who traveled, Kafka who took up carpentry and gardening, Kafka who was, yes, a stifled but also a proficient and widely liked bureaucrat and Kafka who reveled in and was restored by sleep.

Above all, there was the honest, searching, truthful, authentic Kafka of whom Elias Canetti observed, in ''Kafka's Other Trial,'' his beautiful book about Kafka's letters to his on-again, off-again fiancée, Felice Bauer, ''There are writers, admittedly only a few, who are so entirely themselves that any utterance one might presume to make about them must seem barbarous.''

While Mr. Insua's Kafka is not exactly barbarous, he is certainly far too flattened, lugubrious and monotonal, just as his Prague seems to miss a key point: the city, which possesses a mysterious duality, is a place of aching beauty that (even when not under siege by flood) emanates a palpable anxiety. If you visit with some knowledge of its history and having read even a little Kafka, it is not easy to separate Prague from Kafka's transfigured version of it; ideally an exhibition like this ought to be of help.